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Monthly Archives: June 2012

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Remember the game Red Light, Green Light? I remember playing it in gym class in elementary school. The teacher would stand at one end of the gym while everyone else was at the other end. He/she would yell “GREEN LIGHT!” and everyone would walk (never running for some reason…you were “out” if you were caught running) towards the teacher. Out of nowhere you’d hear “RED LIGHT!” and you had to freeze. If you didn’t freeze where you were, you were out. This continued “red light; green light; red light; green light”, until the first person reached the teacher and was declared the winner!

Why am I reminiscing about this childhood game, when clearly Red Rover was MUCH more fun? Well, it randomly popped into my head as I sat here thinking about the adoption process. So far it’s been a red light, green light experience. On Monday we got word that our homestudy draft has been written and ready for us to look over for the go ahead. We have been waiting since May, when our social worker came to our house, for the report to be written. We’ve been in “RED LIGHT” mode since then and now she just yelled “GREEN LIGHT.” The homestudy is approved for a domestic adoption (since we can’t change it over to international until we can pay our international agency fees). At any time, if a birthmother is found, we could follow through with a domestic adoption!

It’s a lot of stop and go and we never know how long we will be waiting at each stop, but we do know that our final destination ends with us being parents !!

First of all, I want to say sorry to our email subscribers….I began this post last night from my phone and apparently you can’t save a draft from your phone, it just goes live. So a half written post went out……here’s the whole thing.

Before we really started looking into adoption, I perceived it as something easy and I wondered why everyone didn’t do it. I’ve seen Annie. Aren’t all the orphans somewhere out there singing and dreaming of their future mothers and fathers? And isn’t there an evil house mother making them clean all the time? And lucky us, we can come in and swoop up one lucky kid all Daddy Warbucks style! Except he was rich… Maybe that’s why the process went so fast for him (minus that little kidnapping incident…but I don’t want to ruin the movie for you….and if you haven’t seen it….um, where have YOU been the past 30 years?) And I’ve seen the TV shows where basically over a three week period of three episodes, a couple sees a child in the hospital and with a little work, they bring her home to live with them forever. Then of course you hear of all these Hollywood stars adopting all the time.

Then you come back from LaLaLand and realize it’s not that easy. Life is not a movie where everything works out in 2 hours or less. But then I hear about all the orphans of the world, I feel like it SHOULD be made easier. They need our help! I don’t want to list facts on here that we have discovered during our research, there are just so many and I don’t want to give out false information. But I do know that, at least internationally, there are millions of children being abandoned for having even minor disabilities. A child is considered “special needs” if they have a weird birthmark or just need a minor surgery that can be done in the US in 5 minutes! It’s very sad what little things will make a parent(s) give up their child or abandon them on the streets.

The story of Annie seemed pretty perfect to me, though her hair may have been a little hard to handle at times….but it was a happy go lucky story of a family growing through adoption in less than 2 hours. While I wish it was that easy, I’m pretty happy with the REAL life we have and hopefully someday we’ll be skipping down marble stairs in formal wear with our kids:)

PS. Sorry if you will now have tunes from Annie stuck in your head all day.

Well it is JUNE! Can you believe it?!?! Not sure where the first half of the year went.

I’ve been looking at our recent blog posts and realized that they have been pretty “heavy” lately. So here is a little, light, airy, happy update.

There really isn’t anything groundbreaking to report on the adoption front. We did just submit a “Birthmother Scrapbook” to our social worker, which will aid in our domestic adoption. When our social worker works with a birthmother, she shows her profiles of parents for her to choose from. Hopefully the book we made reflects us as a couple and future parents. Frank even tried to help!

We are still waiting for our homestudy report to be finished, but once that is written up and we have a copy in hand, we can move forward with some more funding options.

A BIG HUGE thank you to my sister and all those who participated in her Silpada jewelry party. It was a HUGE success and it really humbled us that people who have never even met us, people we haven’t seen forever and of course close friends and family are willing to help us. We are so thankful and blessed to be surrounded by such loving and caring people.

On another positive note, I have been feeling more like myself. After we lost Sarah, I feel like I completely closed myself off from friends who were having children at the same time. I hated being absent from this happy time in their lives. It was just way too hard, especially because everyone was having girls! It has been a real struggle for me to get back to the “I am not actually related to you but your mommy is one of my best friends so I will spoil you like an aunt” stage. I AM getting back there now and it feels good. I love being Auntie Tara! And just in time because one of my best friends is going to be welcoming her baby girl into the world TOMORROW! 🙂 So I guess this is now turning into a thank you to all my girls and their little girls (and a few boys) out there who still love me. You guys know who you are….and I love you and your adorable precious babies….always.

LASTLY, I do not want to minimize this event, it deserves it’s own post, but I also don’t want to over load everyone with multiple posts a week. We had such an amazing and blessed thing happen to us that we just have to share it. This past week we got a letter in the mail…nothing special about the letter by looks. When we opened the letter the note started with a warm greeting in Jesus’s name and then followed up with a comment that although we have never met you face to face, etc. Without sharing the whole note, we received a wonderful greeting and kind words from a very small church in South Carolina…. With that note came a check made out to us to go towards the adoption fund. What an AMAZING blessing it was to see God helping and ministering to us through his people. What an amazing testimony of the heart of that small church that they would even be willing to take up a love offering for two people they never met who live on the other side of the country. God used those people to minister to us and we are more greatful than we could ever relay.

We receive love and support from sooooo many people that we simply can not mention everyone, but sometimes someone ( or a group of someone’s) does something so above and beyond that we must publicly thank God for them. Our friend Rejina Doran who told this church about our struggles went above and beyond !! Lighthouse Baptist Church in North Augusta, SC went above and beyond and we look forward to meeting those people someday and thanking them for their Christian love !!!